On March 20, 2025, 67-year-old retired police officer and Jehovah’s Witness Valery Bailo died. This happened in a hospital in Novorossiysk, where he was hospitalized from a pretrial detention center. There, Valery waited for the sentence to come into force for almost a year and all this time tried to get medical care.
In July 2024, the court sentenced Valery to 2.5 years in prison, recognizing peaceful conversations about the Bible via video link as extremism.
The believer suffered from gastrointestinal diseases and stage 2–3 arthrosis of the knee joint. He needed urgent dental care: in the pretrial detention center, his only tooth, with which he could chew food, became inflamed. The prison food caused digestive problems, so the man ate very little, mostly drank water. Valery also had difficulty moving and needed surgery: in 2018, he suffered serious injuries as a result of a dog attack, his completely torn knee ligaments were stitched up, but over time, his kneecap needed to be replaced.
Valery contacted the Krasnodar Krai Prosecutor’s Office, the regional Human Rights Commissioner, the head of the Krasnodar City Medical Unit No. 23, and the head of the pre-trial detention center. As a result, the prosecutor’s office employee supervising correctional institutions, together with the pre-trial detention center employee, expressed dissatisfaction with the believer’s complaints and threatened him with physical violence and worsening the conditions of his sentence.
On March 21, Valery Bailo’s lawyer filed a statement about the crime committed to the head of the Novorossiysk Investigative Department. “The death of my client was the result of criminal negligence and inaction on the part of the administration of Pretrial Detention Center No. 3 in Novorossiysk in terms of failure to provide him with medical care,” the lawyer noted. The statement lists numerous instances of Valery Bailo’s complaints about his health being ignored. On March 7, the lawyer filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation regarding the failure to provide medical care to his client and the misuse of funds in attempts to provide it. There has been no response to this complaint to date.
The death of Valery Bailo is the 13th death in the context of the criminal prosecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses since the beginning of modern persecution. Three women and ten men aged 51 to 90 died without ever seeing their good names restored. Some believers are in danger due to poor health in places of detention. For example, disabled person of the second group Andrei Vlasov urgently needs surgical intervention of a neurosurgeon, otherwise he is at risk of ischemic stroke of the spinal cord and complete paralysis of the limbs. Disabled person of the third group Adam Svarichevsky has difficulties in receiving medical care and medicines, while his conditions of detention in the colony are periodically worsened. 72-year-old Boris Andreev and 71-year-old Anatoly Marunov, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, remain behind bars. The first needs examination in connection with suspected oncological disease, the second is scheduled for surgery at the end of March 2025.
